Periodic Reporting for period 1 - GTS (Genetic Translation Studies)
Reporting period: 2020-06-01 to 2022-05-31
The Genetic Translation Studies project addresses exactly these questions. Firstly, it ventures into the archives of translators to gather, analyse, and classify documentary evidence that reveals how translation processes and strategies evolve during the rewriting of a literary work. Secondly, it contextualizes this genetic evidence, placing it within its historical context. Thirdly, it uses sociological research methods, surveys and interviews, to determine how evidence of translation process is conserved by translators, publishers, libraries and archives, who is more likely to conserve these materials and why.
Furthermore, knowing how expert literary translators decide which strategies to pursue, when they exercise or restrain their creativity, and when it is circumscribed will be a vital resource for teachers of translation.
These insights inform a new methodology for genetic research in translation studies.
• Exploring literary archives in Europe and discovering evidence of literary translation
• Analyzing the findings and developing evidence-based hypotheses about the nature of the translation process
• Developing a questionnaire for literary translators to gather information about their habits and opinions about if and how they archive their work
• Presentation of findings at international conferences in Europe and beyond, as well as to international networks of scholars (eg. The Self-translation Research Network)
• Editing a special issue of the longest-standing journal for translation research, Meta: translators’ journal devoted to Translation Archives
• Publishing theoretical articles in leading journals such as Translation Studies, PMLA and Meta
• Writing chapters for handbooks designed for students, teachers and researchers of translation, such as the The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Methodology and The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Beckett
• Encoding translation manuscripts for the cutting-edge digital humanities project, Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project (www.beckettarchive.org) so that translation manuscripts can be analysed with digital tools
Furthermore, this project makes a significant contribution to the “creative turn” in translation studies. Extensive archival research carried out during this project, publicized in its dissemination activities, has detailed the complexity of translators’ work and the need for translators’ creativity to be assessed with independent criteria that account for the professional and ethical specificity of translation and the ontology of the translated text. By promoting an understanding of the complex nature of the translation genesis, findings from this project help alleviate certain ambiguities or anxieties that arise when a desire to recognize the creativity of translators leads to the conflation of translatorship with authorship. Conversely, this project has also shown how the discipline of genetic criticism can shed its untenable Romantic heritage and its biased equation of creativity with original authorship by adopting a translation studies perspective.
This project has instigated the first study of the archival habits of working translators. It advances the state of the art by providing data on whether, why, and how translators conserve their prepublication notes and drafts – materials vital for the future of genetic translation research. These new insights will help to orient future inquiry and inform translator training.